I was asked how I see AppGini in comparison to other RAD development platforms. As so often, it depends on the task, which tool is suitable. And it depends on your priorities. Nowadays, some people care more about things looking modern than about them working well and being quickly adaptable to business processes. Here are a few points that convinced me personally to choose AppGini for my own business and for customer projects. Not everything about AppGini is good for me either. Nor is everything about other code-generating products.
For my customer projects, I have found a good solution with AppGini.
Always remember:
Anyone who says they can do it better, faster or cheaper should first prove it!
Recommendation
Get your own opinion. Compare systems. Don't just believe the colourful websites that promise you everything, but ask for proof, ask for binding prices, ask for promised delivery time. Then decide on which system to use for a future project.
The price of AppGini is so low, give it a try and start with a small project. For example start by replacing one of your company's Excel-Spreadsheets by a full-featured intranet web application in one day.
My Personal Background
I wrote my first program in 1985 and earned my first money with programming in 1994. I have been developing professional software for over 25 years now. In this long time I have seen several systems come and many go. I have seen emerging and promising technologies that disappeared within months. And I still see systems that have been "said" dead since the late 1990s and still hold substantial market shares.
I have learned programming in different languages like Basic, Pascal, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, VB.NET, VBA, VBS, ASP, ASP.NET, Silverlight, PHP, Java, Javascript, TypeScript. I have been working with different relational database systems like Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB. Since 2008 I have been programming and using and still maintaining an ORM-generator for C# based on Microsoft SQL Server schemata. This is being used in Software for Northern German government for years now. From my experience, I believe I can estimate systems, especially any kind of code-generators. And yet this is "only" my personal opinion.
Time to market
- First impression in minutes, not days
- First functional web application in days, not weeks
- Full featured web application in days or weeks, not months
Customer needs a new table? No problem. Customer needs additional fields? No Problem. Customer needs upload of PDF's to an existing table? No problem. Such requirements can be fulfilled in minutes. Customer wants to change permissions per user or group on certain data tables? A matter of seconds.
Server-Platform
- Runs (almost) everywhere - The components required on serverside can run almost everywhere. You don't need any Docker nor NodeJS nor other environment on serverside, but you can run the stack at almost every hosting provider for a $1 hosting package.
- Proven technology stack - Still, the combination of Apache webserver, MySQL/MariaDB database server and PHP as serverside programming language is one of the most used full stack webdevelopment stacks available on almost every platform (LAMP, WAMP, MAMP).
- no SaaS, no cloud
- Sensitive and confidential data can be kept in local area network
Client Platform
- No installation on the clients
- Just a modern browser required
- Runs (almost) everywhere
- PC
- Notebook
- Tablet
- Mac
- Smartphone
- ...
- Intuitive UI: Once you have understood how to use tables and detail views, you can use every application based on this platform without any further training.
Database
- Automatic database creation and
- Automatic database migration
Those of you who have ever developed databases that are available in different versions (Development, Test, Production, Archive) or that have to be kept up to date on different systems (Development, Production version 1.0, Test Version 1.1, update Production to Version 1.1, etc.) will know how much time this can take and how carefully and precisely work has to be done to avoid data loss. Automatic database schema migration, out of the box, is one of my favourite features of AppGini, yet too undererstimated!
Security
- User-, Group- and Session-Management built in including Session Timeouts and redirection
- Generated code already contains protection against
- Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS)
- Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF)
- SQL-injection
- Proven concept
- Tested code base
Personally, I trust the generated and tested code much more in terms of security than if I myself or an employed developer were to program the security system from scratch. On every update!
Amazing Features out of the box
- Search over all fields, customizable
- Lookups
- Search within the dropdowns with AJAX functionality
- in-form-creation of lookup values using modal dialogs
- Automatic Pagination in table views
- Form Validation out of the box
- Simple Notification of users (using sendmail or SMTP)
- Import / Export out of the box including sync with existing records
- AJAX check for uniqueness when editing unique fields
- Table Sorting and Filtering
- Users can hide columns
Low Cost
Development Cost
- License cost for AppGini + Plugins, if required, is still much less than license cost of most competitive products or SaaS-solutions.
- AppGini generates database, backend and UI with a click. This saves you weeks of development and years of training.
Maintenance Cost
- 100% of the generated code has been tested in thousands of applications worldwide. You can focus on bugfixing your own code (custom pages, hooks)
- Updating takes only two steps: Generate the code, then (FTP-) Upload (or copy & paste files) to your server. Done. Both can even be automated.
Licensing
- No runtime fees
- No pay-per use cost
- No monthly fees
Training
- Due to the easy-to-use user-interface (UI) and keep-it-simple-stupid approach (KISS) there is no big need for training which means almost no cost for training and almost no employee absences.
- As soon as users once know how to use the software, they will be able to use every new feature and every new application, based on this tool, without further training. Especially if you add descriptions and help-texts to your data model already.
Data Center Cost
- No license cost for
- server OS
- webserver
- database server
- Backup of filesystem and database can be integrated with standard backup routines. There is no need for special backup-agents.
Extensibility
- Hooks
- Before Insert, After Insert
- Before Update, After Update
- Before Delete, After Delete
- Customize Queries on the fly before table display
- Customize Detail View forms on serverside and/or on client side
- Custom HTML tempates
- Custom Pages (only three lines of PHP code required to get a fully integrated custom page)
- Data can be accessed from other systems, for example ETL (Knime, ...)
- In all customizations ther are easy to use functions for...
- data-access
- model-access
- permission-checks
- ...
User Interface
- Bootstrap based HTML5 user interface
- Compatibale with almost all operating systems
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- iOS
- ...
- Compatible with many devices
- PC, Mac
- Notebook, Laptop
- TabletPC, IPad
- Smartphone
- Compatible with all modern browsers
- Chrome
- Edge
- Firefox
- Opera
- Safari
- ...
A few AppGini community members miss the update to Bootstrap 4. In the meantime even Bootstrap 5 is public. I can understand the complaints, but on the other hand I have everything I need in Bootstrap 3. I don't miss anything in for customer projects. A switch from BS3 to BS5 would mean a big effort in programming, not only for BigProf but also for me.
Legal
- We can install the whole sourcecode on premise
- or we can provide the application as SaaS
- This means we can give away the whole sourcecode into customer's hands even as commercial product.
Proof
Here are a few screenshots of my projects, all done with AppGini + customization
